Know Your Money with Bronwyn Waner and Craig Finch
Know Your Money with Bronwyn Waner and Craig Finch
93. The Transformative Power of Courage in Financial Planning 7 of 7
How to buy Rob's book:
Discount code: PTD1
https://vindigopress.com/product/7-pillars-of-financial-health/
Can courage truly transform your financial future? Find out as we unravel the surprising power of 'unsexy' courage in navigating the complex world of financial planning. Inspired by the profound wisdom of Maya Angelou and Tegan Phillips, this episode highlights the importance of confronting difficult conversations and making tough decisions during pivotal life transitions. We promise you'll gain insight into how financial advisors and clients can embrace vulnerability and openness to foster meaningful, long-term financial health.
We venture into the realm where courage acts as a catalyst for clarity, confidence, and connection. The journey involves embracing the courage to ask tough questions, make honest choices, and collaborate effectively by recognizing blind spots. As we share strategies for building trust through courageous communication, you'll learn how transparency and honesty can resolve conflicts and build stronger bonds. Whether you're a financial planner or seeking personal growth, this episode will equip you with the tools to redefine your financial journey with courage at the core.
Please subscribe to our podcast or have a look at our website
www.growthfp.co.za
Welcome to Know your Money, where we will explore our relationship with money and how the psychology of it impacts our financial decisions, as everyone thinks about money differently. In our podcast, we'll be presenting a variety of financial topics in an easy to understand way, which we hope will assist you with managing your money. Hello everybody, welcome to Know your Money. Craig Warren, how are you today?
Speaker 2:Very good Bomber and you.
Speaker 1:I'm very well. Thank you, Warren.
Speaker 3:I'm well. Thank you, craig Good to see you buddy, good to see you.
Speaker 1:Okay, guys, so we are on the last C of the series because Rob's here yes, one day, rob is down oh, dear, and there's seven of them. Isn't that a good number?
Speaker 4:and does this mean that? Does this mean that's the last time I'm here?
Speaker 3:no, no, no, maybe for next week, rob, okay, okay, I'm here. No, no, no, the door's going to be closed the next time I come, is that right? Maybe for next week, rob, okay, okay, I'm sure you need a break but.
Speaker 4:I'm going to miss you.
Speaker 2:You're always welcome. You know You've got a lot of content and I'm sure there's many more subjects we can talk about, and I hope you do join us again.
Speaker 4:Well thanks very much.
Speaker 1:It's been fun and I'm sad that it's coming to an end, and what is the last one?
Speaker 4:The last one, arguably, is the most important one. You know we keep the best to last and the last one is courage. And yeah, that might again seem a bit odd, but I think we've talked through the other six Cs and really I think to implement the other six Cs, you know we need courage and to be willing to engage with this work in this way.
Speaker 4:I think we need courage. If I may just share a quote with you from Maya Angelou, who said courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you cannot practice any other virtue consistently. And so I think the interesting thing about courage is that we often think about it in physical terms. So I know for me, I try and mountain bike and I'm not very courageous and as a result of that, I'm not very good at it. And courage is very helpful in physical terms, but on an intrapersonal, so within ourselves, and interpersonal courage is less obvious, it's less evident. You can't see it being displayed. And a woman named Tegan Phillips, who you might have heard of, she's a bit of a TED Talk. She did a TED Talk in Cape Town a few years ago. She's a South African cyclist and a cartoonist and she talks about the distinction between sexy courage and unsexy courage. And I suppose sexy courage is obviously the physical courage and I'm afraid to say today we're going to be talking about the unsexy courage.
Speaker 1:So sorry about that yeah.
Speaker 4:But I mean you know the work that you guys do as financial planners. You get to be with clients in potentially very difficult sort of points in their lives or phases in their lives. You know we talk about people going through up to 80 transitions in their life. Some can be great, like getting married, having kids. Others can be very traumatizing, like somebody dying, somebody being disabled. What is your sense of this? You know, how do you feel about courage as something that's important for your work?
Speaker 2:I suppose it goes down to some of the conversations you need to have with your clients, you know, and sometimes they're very uncomfortable. I think we spoke a few weeks ago about the markets and when the markets like Warren said, in 2008,. The markets came off and, as we said, it's going to happen again and the pressure is to go to cash, jump out the market safe haven and you've got to say no, it's not the you know, long term it's not going to be the right option. You need to stay in the market and it will be a better outcome.
Speaker 2:And those are the very yeah, and it's easier for us as financial planners to say to the client yes, you're right, flip you into cash and I can sleep at night. I don't have to take your call the next day when the markets come off again. The next day it's off the table now. But the problem is getting back in the market, as we know Can't time it. So those kind of discussions you need to have. And also, I suppose it goes back to the plans as well. You might have excellent plans with you and the client and they don't implement them, and then there's difficult discussions to have, because what will happen if you don't have it? We're not trying to put fear into them, but we're trying to just show them the importance of sticking to the plan.
Speaker 1:And I think for a client it's so important to have the courage to be able to tell your financial advisor anything and everything, so that they can plan properly for you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's no judgment and it's difficult often to bare your soul and say I've got this problem, I've got this worry, or I have this happening in my life and I'm not sure what I must do. It's easier to sit there and mask it so everything looks good. You know, meanwhile it's not good.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and also like if they come to us and say I want to buy that new car, you've got to kind of pluck up the courage to almost crush one of their dreams by telling them you know, this isn't really in your financial plan. I think that takes a lot of courage to do that, but it's important to have it and for the person receiving that to be able to have courage that they've got to trust their advisor in that call.
Speaker 4:I think yeah, absolutely yeah. So it requires courage from you to challenge clients, to push back on clients, and I think that, in a way, it goes back to the evolution of financial planning as a profession, in that it started out as a sales function and to be a good salesperson, the last thing you want to do is challenge a client.
Speaker 1:The client's always right.
Speaker 4:Yeah, the client's always right and so this is a real shift. So it's something for clients to get used to. To say, actually, this financial planner is challenging me, he's making me think about and we've spoken about curiosity he's making me think about my own life and questioning me and asking me to think is that really what you want to be doing? And that requires courage. And it requires courage of the client to obviously interrogate their own lives. But going back to what you said, bronwyn, about when clients come to you and this is the key, and you probably know Brené Brown, who's a sort of a TED Talk phenomenon and she's written lots of books on vulnerability, on shame, on leadership, and she talks about the fact that you can't get to courage without rumbling with vulnerability. So she's saying that any act of courage comes from a place of vulnerability because otherwise it's not courageous. It's a bit like if you know what the outcome of what you're going to do before you do it, that doesn't require courage. You know what I mean.
Speaker 4:If I know what the outcome of what you're going to do before you do it. That doesn't require courage. You know what I mean If I know what's going to happen, I don't need courage to do it. Courage is about when I don't know what the outcome is going to be, and Brené Brown defines vulnerability as the emotion we experience during times of uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure.
Speaker 3:And that's the planning.
Speaker 4:Yeah, exactly, and I think that your clients are experiencing that every time they come and see you to different degrees. Yeah, but there's uncertainty, which is where we started the series, you know, when I shared that story of my dad and his airplane crash and being in the water and that uncertainty of deciding what to do.
Speaker 4:It never gets certain you know, we live in a world of uncertainty and your clients are desperate for certainty. We all are. Our brains are wired for certainty, you know. That's what our brains keep us safe. And how do we know we're safe? Well, when things are certain. Risk there's risk in our lives all the time, and emotional exposure, you know so. Uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure is what Brené Brown defines as vulnerability, and that actually is the sort of the ingredients that are needed for courage. You know so if you don't have those things there, then you don't need courage. But I think your clients need courage hugely because they're going to be feeling that when they come and see you. You know, and to be able to work with that vulnerability is about having courage. So I think you know I feel like I'm rambling a bit here?
Speaker 3:No, not at all.
Speaker 1:This was great. No, not at all. Warren, how do you feel about being vulnerable when it comes to talking about money?
Speaker 3:I think being vulnerable is one of the best things you can do. I think people respect you more when you're vulnerable with them, when you have the courage to be vulnerable with somebody. And I've certainly noticed in my life, coming back from the UK, coming here, having a few things in my life go a bit wrong and being able to have hard conversations with people took the courage to do so and put me onto the path that I am on now, and I'm so happy that I did that. So I completely agree with that vulnerability. There is no courage Because they are one is the other.
Speaker 3:Yeah, hi everyone. If you would like to get a copy of Rob's book, the Seven Pillars of Financial Health, we have shared a link in the bio with the web address as well as a discount code you can use. The book retails for R375, excluding delivery, and with this promo code you will pay R370, which includes delivery. Alternatively, you can find the book at exclusive books or other bookstores. We would like to thank you for listening and please remember to like, subscribe and share the podcast so that we can bring on more exciting guests like Rob to help you with knowing yourself and knowing your money.
Speaker 4:And we said. I said at the start that in a sense, courage is necessary for all of the other skills, cs, whatever you want to call them that we've spoken about. You know you could look at each one and see how courage plays into that. So, if you go back to clarity, clarity takes courage. Because, to your point, bronwyn, that you keep drumming home for me is, yes, we can have what we really want. We can have it, but it takes courage to work out, to be clear, what is it I really want. It really does take courage. And am I willing to go there? Am I willing to sort of be open to the idea that I need to now, you know, make choices that I really really want, as opposed to just going with the flow? And then confidence takes courage.
Speaker 4:So the philosopher Gutter said that courage is the commitment to begin without any guarantee of success. And obviously if you do commit to something and it is successful, you build confidence. But to commit you've got to have the courage and obviously the opposite is true. Failure can erode confidence. We can lose our confidence if we fail.
Speaker 1:And I think that's where you need to see failure just as feedback instead of something bad, absolutely.
Speaker 3:You have to have the courage to fail, because that's where the successes are born. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah, absolutely. And then, you know, connection requires courage. You know, I remember working with a financial planner who said you know a client's life's important, but we'll talk about the money first and then, over time, we'll get to talking about their life, you know, which is completely the wrong way around, and one of the reasons was that that planner felt vulnerable on the sort of emotional level and didn't really want to connect with their clients emotionally, you know. So connection does require courage and also the sort of possibility that there will be failure in that that I actually won't connect with this person, or I thought I'd connected and we actually hadn't connected, because I got a phone call telling me about something that they'd done which was crazy, you know.
Speaker 4:And then curiosity requires courage, you know. I mean, you know that old story about lawyers in a courtroom. You know, Never ask a question unless you know the answer that you're going to get to the question. You know, and here what we're suggesting is, as financial planners, you want to ask questions that you definitely don't know the answer to. That requires courage, you know. To do that, to be curious, and then for your clients to be curious about their own lives, you know, we are creatures of habit. We have this thing called the inertia bias If things are comfortable, we'll just keep going. You know so to be curious and that curiosity creates the possibility of changing things, of your friend going off, and you know that you shared with us in a previous podcast, Warren, yeah, yeah, Becoming a….
Speaker 2:Took a lot of courage.
Speaker 4:yeah, yeah, from being an investment guy to a coder, that's huge courage. And then also, from your perspective particularly, collaboration takes courage because you know you're the experts, you're the professionals clients are coming to you for advice. And for you to say to your clients well, actually, we want to collaborate here, we want to make sure that what we do is right for you, and we know that clients the one thing we know that clients are expert in is in their own lives. But they'd often still have blind spots. And so for you to collaborate with clients and to blind spots, you know. And so for you to collaborate with clients and to unpack that with them, you know, requires courage. And then the last one, the last scene that we spoke about in the last podcast communication. You know that requires courage. You know to be willing to communicate good stuff, bad stuff, to be consistent.
Speaker 3:Yeah, open and honest communication. It's not always easy. No, no More often than not, it isn't yeah, more often, you're right.
Speaker 4:No, no, I mean I was with a group of planners a few weeks ago and one of the planners came up to me after the session and was sort of asking, in a sense, for advice, because what had happened was they had made a mistake on a client's account and they had hoped to correct the mistake before they had to communicate to the client and they hadn't been successful. So now they're sitting in a situation where they had hoped to correct the error, it hadn't been corrected and now they had a client meeting. What do they do? Do they share it or don't they? But to your point, if you are vulnerable, if you are willing to disclose an error, the chances are you're actually going to increase trust with your clients.
Speaker 3:I mean, I don't know if you guys I mean you probably don't ever make mistakes- Well, you and I I have a carpentry business as well, and through fear my employee Joseph would in the past, when we were early on working together, he wouldn't tell me if he'd made a mistake, and then invariably I'd find out about it and it would really upset me because he didn't understand that it wasn't the mistake that upset me, it was him lying about it or omitting it. And so while I was away, now in the UK, I get a call one day and he goes Woz, I'm very sorry, what have you done?
Speaker 4:Joseph.
Speaker 3:He told me what he'd done and I went that's okay, buddy, we can fix that, it's fine.
Speaker 1:It's fine.
Speaker 3:Try to be more careful while I'm away. But it's fine and it was the courage he had to call me that. Actually it was a non-issue in the end because he communicated with me.
Speaker 2:And Rob, we all make mistakes. Absolutely it happens all the time. Not all the time, but it does happen and it's how you sort them out. That's the important thing, and don't blame anybody. We've had some things happen in suppliers to us that have made mistakes and they try and cover their track. We said it doesn't matter, the mistake happened, let's try and work it out, and it will work out. Just face it and communicate it and we'll both collaborate, we'll sort it out.
Speaker 2:I'm not going to blame anybody. We're human, so we'll sort it out yeah, absolutely yeah.
Speaker 4:and I think that, going back to this idea of being, and I think that you know going back to this idea of being human, and I think you know the seven Cs talk to the sort of pillars of developing financial health as such, and financial health is about being human and about money, you know, and sort of, in some ways, money is this object and being human is quite a complex mix of emotions and experiences and life and conditioning and, and you know, I think it requires courage to work with that you know to work with human beings as human beings and to focus on them and and and for us as human beings, as your clients, to engage with ourselves and and to really, you know, try and live an authentic life.
Speaker 4:you know that we really want to and get you know, have what, have everything we want to have as.
Speaker 3:Bronwyn promises, and I want to just say the courage to be authentic.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. In this day and age of social media and everyone trying to one-up each other to be, yourself is. It takes a lot of courage.
Speaker 4:Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and it's ongoing. It's ongoing, it's never done. You know and I think that also talks to financial health You're never done, whether you're 30, 50, 70, 90. It's an ongoing process.
Speaker 4:We've got to keep working at it. But I would hope that with the seven pillars that we've talked about, that they can be part of the process and part of the mix of helping your clients, you know, develop that financial health and I think you know it's something you know I realize we're coming towards the end. Just to say, the subtitle of the book is Partnering with a Professional to Thrive Sort of going back to where we started is that, you know, because you know it requires things like courage to be financially healthy. It helps to work with professionals like yourselves, you know, to have a partner who helps you, who's with you, who cares for you.
Speaker 4:You know, something I forgot to mention when you spoke about curiosity, you know, is that the current definition of curiosity is, you know, inquisitiveness, to be inquisitive about somebody like the cat. But actually, in its original form, curiosity meant to care, and so being curious is about caring, and I think you guys are in the caring profession, in a caring profession.
Speaker 4:And that being in a caring profession, as we saw during COVID, requires courage, and so I think that you know you guys do an incredible job, you know, with your clients and for your clients in what you do, and hopefully what we've talked about in this series is giving your clients a sense of you know. If they can bring their human selves to the relationship, it can only enhance, you know. So it's not just about bringing your money to the relationship, you know, because your clients are not money, is not money.
Speaker 2:Yeah no that's perfect.
Speaker 4:They aren't money. Your clients are people.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, so we're really working with people, people helping people to secure their financial future Exactly.
Speaker 4:Great.
Speaker 1:It's been so insightful. Thank you for joining us, rob, and for coming through and sharing your knowledge and all of your experiences. We've loved having you here. Thanks so much, thanks very much.
Speaker 2:Bronwyn Incredible Rob, thank you so much and the book has been amazing much. Bronwyn incredible Rob, thank you so much and the book has been amazing.
Speaker 3:Thank you as well, thank you very much. Thank you, thank you, rob, and safe travels. Thanks, warren take care.
Speaker 1:I hope I get invited back for sure, there's many more topics can I message you when I look at the weather forecast let's start, rob.
Speaker 3:I've got to speak to you. Thanks, warren, take, let's talk.
Speaker 4:Rob, I've got to say a review, you'll be fine.
Speaker 1:Thanks, oren, take care guys, all the best, bye.
Speaker 2:Thank you for listening. If you have enjoyed this podcast and would like to subscribe, please visit our website wwwgrowthfpcoza. The information we have provided in this podcast is our personal opinion. For more detailed information, please discuss your financial situation with a financial planner.